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The sine and the cosine functions, for example, are used to describe simple harmonic motion, which models many natural phenomena, such as the movement of a mass attached to a spring and, for small angles, the pendular motion of a mass hanging by a string. The sine and cosine functions are one-dimensional projections of uniform circular motion.
Similar right triangles illustrating the tangent and secant trigonometric functions Trigonometric functions and their reciprocals on the unit circle. The Pythagorean theorem applied to the blue triangle shows the identity 1 + cot 2 θ = csc 2 θ, and applied to the red triangle shows that 1 + tan 2 θ = sec 2 θ.
In mathematics, sine and cosine are trigonometric functions of an angle.The sine and cosine of an acute angle are defined in the context of a right triangle: for the specified angle, its sine is the ratio of the length of the side that is opposite that angle to the length of the longest side of the triangle (the hypotenuse), and the cosine is the ratio of the length of the adjacent leg to that ...
Ptolemy's theorem states that the sum of the products of the lengths of opposite sides is equal to the product of the lengths of the diagonals. When those side-lengths are expressed in terms of the sin and cos values shown in the figure above, this yields the angle sum trigonometric identity for sine: sin(α + β) = sin α cos β + cos α sin β.
Specifically, they are the inverses of the sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions, [4] and are used to obtain an angle from any of the angle's trigonometric ratios. Inverse trigonometric functions are widely used in engineering , navigation , physics , and geometry .
In mathematics, the values of the trigonometric functions can be expressed approximately, as in (/), or exactly, as in (/) = /.While trigonometric tables contain many approximate values, the exact values for certain angles can be expressed by a combination of arithmetic operations and square roots.
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For example, the sine of angle θ is defined as being the length of the opposite side divided by the length of the hypotenuse. The six trigonometric functions are defined for every real number , except, for some of them, for angles that differ from 0 by a multiple of the right angle (90°).